This is the posting place for Steve, animator of the avatar Alphonsus Peck. I am a philosopher, prim builder, artist, poet, writer, computer programmer, reader, and all around nice guy. I am also unable to focus on things for great lengths of time, which makes me a jack of all arts, master of none.

Friday, March 16, 2007

Second Life Validations

Second Life is a world where those living lives of "quiet desperation" become loud and vocal.

Throw away the mortgage, the kids struggling through school, the failures, the lost hopes and dreams. "Validate me, make me real," cries the collective consciousness of this brave new world.

And people put on their cybernetic Pinocchios, and they tell lies to their hearts content because their noses won't grow, and they try to get from an artificial world the validation that has eluded them so thoroughly in reality.

Man-boys enter the world wanting to have sex with anything that looks vaguely female. "Validate me. Prove to me I'm a man!" And the puppet grasps at validation, but the puppet remains a puppet, and no amount of cybering will cause the blue fairy to appear to make the puppet real. Men sit in their chairs, overweight, lonely, neither knowing nor really caring if the woman av they are cybering with is another overweight, lonely man.

We wear our desperation in our perfectly formed, idealized, twenty-five-ish armors. Perfect appearance means nothing in a world where everyone is perfect. "Pay no attention to the man behind the keyboard. See me as this. Love this, and I will try to pretend that it is I."

How often does true validation occur? Only in so far as the av in-world reflects the truth of the souls on the other side of the curtain. For it is we as we are, not the artificial self we want people to believe us to be, that needs the validation. To validate the artificial is empty. The only part that is real is the truth of our souls that we pour into the metaverse.

Unto our own avs be true. Reach out and explore the outer edges of the possible. Try to attain the idealization of what we are, and beware of temptations of that which we think we want to be.